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126 books match the query 'Communism' and 11 start with r

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Reassessing Communism

Concepts, Culture, and Society in Poland 1944–1989

Instytutem Badan Literackich PAN Chmielewska

Central European University Press, 2021

The thirteen authors of this collective work undertook to articulate matter-of-fact critiques of the dominant narrative about communism in Poland while offering new analyses of the concept, and also examining the manifestations of anticommunism. Approaching communist ideas and practices, programs and their implementations, as an inseparable whole, they examine the issues of emancipation, upward social mobility, and changes in the cultural canon.

The authors refuse to treat communism in Poland in simplistic categories of totalitarianism, absolute evil and Soviet colonization, and similarly refuse to equate communism and fascism. Nor do they adopt the neoliberal view of communism as a project doomed to failure. While wholly exempt from nostalgia, these essays show that beyond oppression and bad governance, communism was also a regime in which people pursued a variety of goals and sincerely attempted to build a better world for themselves.

The book is interdisciplinary and applies the tools of social history, intellectual history, political philosophy, anthropology, literature, cultural studies, and gender studies to provide a nuanced view of the communist regimes in east-central Europe.

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Red Chicago

American Communism at Its Grassroots, 1928-35

Randi Storch

University of Illinois Press, 2007

Red Chicago is a social history of American Communism set within the context of Chicago's neighborhoods, industries, and radical traditions. Using local party records, oral histories, union records, party newspapers, and government documents, Randi Storch fills the gap between Leninist principles and the day-to-day activities of Chicago's rank-and-file Communists.

Uncovering rich new evidence from Moscow's former party archive, Storch argues that although the American Communist Party was an international organization strongly influenced by the Soviet Union, at the city level it was a more vibrant and flexible organization responsible to local needs and concerns. Thus, while working for a better welfare system, fairer unions, and racial equality, Chicago's Communists created a movement that at times departed from international party leaders' intentions. By focusing on the experience of Chicago's Communists, who included a large working-class, African American, and ethnic population, this study reexamines party members' actions as an integral part of the communities and industries in which they lived and worked.

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Red Diapers

GROWING UP IN THE COMMUNIST LEFT

Edited by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro

University of Illinois Press, 1998

      Red Diapers is the
        first anthology of autobiographical writings by the children of American
        communists. These memoirs, short stories, and poems reflect the joys and
        perils of growing up in a subculture defined by its opposition to some
        of society's most deeply held values. How red diaper babies have come
        to terms with their political inheritance is the theme of this compelling
        anthology.
      Some contributors have fond
        memories of family activism; others recall the past with ambivalence or
        even pain. The authors range in age from their twenties to their eighties.
        Some, such as Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein and sixties activist Bettina
        Aptheker, are widely known themselves; some are the children of well-known
      American leftists, including Jeff Lawson, son of blacklisted screenwriter
        John Howard Lawson, and Robert Meeropol, son of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg.
        In disparate voices, the contributors elaborate on how their parents attempted
      to pass on to them the torch of radical politics.

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Red International and Black Caribbean

Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939

Margaret Stevens

Pluto Press, 2017

Too often grouped together, the black radicalism movement has a history wholly separate from the international communist movement of the early twentieth century. In Red International and Black Caribbean Margaret Stevens sets out to correct this enduring misconception. Focusing on the period 1919-39, Stevens explores the political roots of a dozen Communist organizations and parties that were headquartered in New York City, Mexico, and the Caribbean. She describes the inner workings of the Red International—the revolutionary global political network established under the Communist International—in relation to struggles against racial and colonial oppression. In doing so, she also highlights how the significant victories and setbacks of black people fighting against racial oppression developed within the context of the global Communist movement.

Challenging dominant accounts, Red International and Black Caribbean debunks the “great men” narrative, emphasizes the role of women in their capacity as laborers, and paints the true struggles of black peasants and workers in Communist parties.

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Red Star Over Malaya

Resistance and Social Conflict During and After the Japanese Occupation, 1941-1946

Cheah Boon Kheng

National University of Singapore Press, 2012

Red Star Over Malaya is an account of the inter-racial relations between Malays and Chinese during the final stages of the Japanese occupation. In 1947, none of the three major race of Malaya - Malays, Chinese, and Indians - regarded themselves as pan-ethnic "Malayans" with common duties and problems. With the occupation forcibly cut them off from China, Chinese residents began to look inwards towards Malaya and stake political claims, leading inevitably to a political contest with the Malays. As the country advanced towards nationhood and self-government, there was tension between traditional loyalties to the Malay rulers and the states, or to ancestral homelands elsewhere, and the need to cultivate an enduring loyalty to Malaya on the part of those who would make their home there in future.

As Japanese forces withdrew from the countryside, the Chinese guerrillas of the communist-led resistance movement, the Malayan People's Anti-Japanese Army (MPAJA), emerged from the jungle and took control of some 70 per cent of the country's smaller towns and villages, seriously alarming the Malay population. When the British Military Administration sought to regain control of these liberated areas, the ensuing conflict set the tone for future political conflicts and marked a crucial stage in the history of Malaya. Based on extensive archival research, Red Star Over Malaya provides a riveting account of the way the Japanese occupation reshaped colonial Malaya, and of the tension-filled months that followed Japan's surrender. This book is fundamental to an understanding of social and political developments in Malaysia during the second half of the 20th century.

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Red Star Over the Third World

Vijay Prashad

Pluto Press, 2019

“An original and much needed analysis of an important but neglected aspect of the legacy of the Russian Revolution…. Essential reading.”—Mary Davis, Marx Memorial Library

From Cuba to Vietnam, China to South Africa, the October Revolution of 1917 inspired millions of people beyond the territory of Russia. It proved that the masses could not only overthrow autocratic governments, but that they could also form an opposing government in their own image.

The new idea that the working class and the peasantry could be allied, combined with the clear strength and necessity of a vanguard party, guided multiple revolutions across the globe. Here is much-needed antidote to all the glum histories written on the demise of the Soviet Union. Vijay Prashad throws a spotlight on the way the Russian Revolution was seen and received in the countries colonized by European empires. With Russia as an inspiration and providing support, suddenly workers and peasants, those left out of capitalist prosperity, organized and attempted to create for themselves real socialist revolution. Prashad’s chapters include:

*Eastern Graves
*Red October
*Follow the Path of the Russians
*The Lungs of Russia
*Soviet Asia
*Enemy of Imperialism
*Eastern Marxism
*Colonial Fascism
*Polycentric Communism
*Memories of Communism

The author writes in this Preface, “It has been a quarter-century since the demise of the USSR. And yet, the marks of the October Revolution remain—not just in the territories of the USSR but more so in what used to be known as the Third World. From Cuba to Vietnam, from China to South Africa, the October Revolution remains as an inspiration. After all, that Revolution proved that the working class and the peasantry could not only overthrow an autocratic government but it could form its own government.”

This book explains the power of the October Revolution in the Global South. From Ho Chí Minh to Fidel Castro, reflections on polycentric communism, and collective memories of communism, it shows how, for a brief moment, another world was possible.

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Red War on the Family

Sex, Gender, and Americanism in the First Red Scare

Erica J Ryan

Temple University Press, 2016

In the 1920s, cultural and political reactions to the Red Scare in America contributed to a marked shift in the way Americans thought about sexuality, womanhood, manhood, and family life. The Russian Revolution prompted anxious Americans sensing a threat to social order to position heterosexuality, monogamy, and the family as a bulwark against radicalism.

In her probing and engaging book, Red War on the Family, Erica Ryan traces the roots of sexual modernism and the history of antiradicalism and antifeminism. She illuminates how Americans responded to foreign and domestic threats and expressed nationalism by strengthening traditional gender and family roles-especially by imposing them on immigrant groups, workers, women, and young people.

Ryan argues that the environment of political conformity in the 1920s was maintained in part through the quest for cultural and social conformity, exemplified by white, middle-class family life. Red War on the Family charts the ways Americanism both reinforced and was reinforced by these sexual and gender norms in the decades after World War I.

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Reinventing Chinese Tradition

The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism

Ka-ming Wu

University of Illinois Press, 2015

The final destination of the Long March and center of the Chinese Communist Party's red bases, Yan'an acquired mythical status during the Maoist era. Though the city's significance as an emblem of revolutionary heroism has faded, today's Chinese still glorify Yan'an as a sanctuary for ancient cultural traditions.

Ka-ming Wu's ethnographic account of contemporary Yan'an documents how people have reworked the revival of three rural practices--paper-cutting, folk storytelling, and spirit cults--within (and beyond) the socialist legacy. Moving beyond dominant views of Yan'an folk culture as a tool of revolution or object of market reform, Wu reveals how cultural traditions become battlegrounds where conflicts among the state, market forces, and intellectuals in search of an authentic China play out. At the same time, she shows these emerging new dynamics in the light of the ways rural residents make sense of rapid social change.

Alive with details, Reinventing Chinese Tradition is an in-depth, eye-opening study of an evolving culture and society within contemporary China.

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Rejuvenating Communism

Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China

Jérôme Doyon

University of Michigan Press, 2023

Working for the administration remains one of the most coveted career paths for young Chinese. Rejuvenating Communism: Youth Organizations and Elite Renewal in Post-Mao China seeks to understand what motivates young and educated Chinese to commit to a long-term career in the party-state and how this question is central to the Chinese regime’s ability to maintain its cohesion and survive. Jérôme Doyon draws upon extensive fieldwork and statistical analysis in order to illuminate the undogmatic commitment recruitment techniques and other methods the state has taken to develop a diffuse allegiance to the party-state in the post-Mao era. He then analyzes recruitment and political professionalization in the Communist Party’s youth organizations and shows how experiences in the Chinese Communist Youth League transform recruits and feed their political commitment as they are gradually inducted into the world of officials. As the first in-depth study of the Communist Youth League’s role in recruitment, this book challenges the assumption that merit is the main criteria for advancement within the party-state, an argument with deep implications for understanding Chinese politics today.

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Remembering Communism

Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe

Contributors: Simina Bădica, Iskra Baeva, Tanya Boneva, Corina Cimpoieru, Liliana Deyanova, Albena Hranova, Nataliya Hristova, Petya Kabakchieva, Evgenia Kalinova, Anny Kirilova, Thomas Lindenberger, Tamás Lőnhárt, Izabella Main, Tsvetana Manova, Iliiana Marcheva, Vasil Markov, Andi Mihalache, Cătălina Mihalache, Milla Mineva, Cristina Petrescu, Dragoş Petrescu, Vania Stoyanova, Virgiliu Ţârău, Nikolai Vukov, Smaranda Vultur

Central European University Press, 2014

Remembering Communism examines the formation and transformation of the memory of communism in the post-communist period. The majority of the articles focus on memory practices in the post-Stalinist era in Bulgaria and Romania, with occasional references to the cases of Poland and the GDR. Based on an interdisciplinary approach, including history, anthropology, cultural studies and sociology, the volume examines the mechanisms and processes that influence, determine and mint the private and public memory of communism in the post-1989 era. The common denominator to all essays is the emphasis on the process of remembering in the present, and the modalities by means of which the present perspective shapes processes of remembering, including practices of commemoration and representation of the past.

The volume deals with eight major thematic blocks revisiting specific practices in communism such as popular culture and everyday life, childhood, labor, the secret police, and the perception of “the system”.

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